this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2023
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Anything by Ayn Rand. She’s a terrible author and most people are more interested in showing that they could have read The Fountainhead than actually reading that unfun, meandering garbage.
I read The Fountainhead in a high school English class and then got super into Ayn Rand and read Atlas Shrugged and some of her other stuff on my own. What actually happened was that I was a child in the Florida Public School System and so 1) didn’t understand what capitalism was, 2) couldn’t recognize terrible writing, and 3) was enjoying how proud my dad was for once.
Now I’m in my 30s and I can’t bring myself to throw away books at all, but also refuse to give them away and put them back out into the world for other dumbasses and/or impressionable children to find. They live on a bookshelf in my back room strategically positioned so that even if someone did go into that room they’d have to dig through a bunch of French textbooks and ancient American Girl books to find them.
If anyone would like some garbage propaganda advocating for a society of psychopaths written in the style of your drunk uncle’s auto-transcribed voice memos, hit me up.
You should burn them for warmth so they finally serve a purpose
Jesus
People can just enjoy them for stories and not actually believe in what the writer wants them to believe.
I can personally attest to that as I have to do it with most fiction, including Ayn Rand stuff.
-John Rogers
I tried to read the Fountainhead twice when I was a teenager and I never got more than a third of the way. It felt like watching an old person try to remember their shopping list
Yeah. My grandpa made me read Atlas Shrugged when I was in HS and it was so dumb it made me a communist. I did like the scene with the fast train on the green rails. Literally the only scene in the whole book with imagery.
Nothing killed libertarianism for 19 year old me like reading that trash.
Can you blame them? Even South Park made fun of how bad Atlas Shrugged is.
I somehow plowed through enough of it for a B+, but spent the whole time planning to burn it when I got done. And saying so. Never ended up bothering, though. Probably because I never "got done." I'm not sure what reference, summary, or conversations I referenced to write a scathing final essay that's still lying around here somewhere, but I know I never read that big dumb speech. Maybe I just skipped it and resumed skimming, sixty pages later.
I was never self-centered enough to miss that the climax is Ayn Rand's self-insert setting the world on fire to kill everyone who disagreed with her and everyone who didn't agree with her hard enough.